Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to ask yourself whether you could finish a task before moving it to the next day's to do list. Don't take it for granted that unfinished tasks will get migrated from one day to the next. Pause to consider whether you could just get the tasks done. Longtime listeners have probably heard me recommend seeing a to do list
as a contract with yourself. I see putting a task on a to do list as a promise that you will complete the task that day. For people who don't take that perspective, though, I would suggest at least being a little slower to migrate a task from one days to do list to the next. When you review your to do list at the end of the day, Before you migrate lots of tasks to future days, consider what
you could actually just get done. Could you finish? Maybe you needed to send personalized invitations to twenty five people for an event your organization is hosting. You have sent invitations to fifteen of them. When your alarm rings to tell you it is time to start dinner, could you take your laptop down to the kitchen from your home office and knock out the last ten invitations while you are waiting for the water to boil. Then you don't
have to push this task to the next day. Or you might have intended to go to the dry cleaner on your way to work after taking your kids to daycare, but you skipped it because you wanted some desk time before your first meeting. Could you drop off your dry cleaning on the way home from picking up your kids in the afternoon, then you don't need to kick it forward another day. Perhaps a task isn't time consuming, it is just unpleasant and that is why you haven't done it.
Could you simply resolve to hit send on the difficult email before you leave for the day. How great will that feel to not have it hanging over your head. For a task that is time consuming, perhaps half hour after your kids go to bed might give you the time to finish it. A relatively short second shift could be worth it. It can be easy to keep migrating a task day after day from one to do list to the next, But if the task wouldn't take that long in the first place, then migrating it is probably
not necessary. If you get into the habit of asking yourself whether you could finish, I think few things will happen. First, you will get more done because you won't concede defeat too early. Often the answer will be yes, I could get that done today. Second, your to do list will get shorter because tasks will get done instead of constantly accumulating.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, you may be more productive during the core part of the day If you start to expect yourself to finish what you set out to do. Asking whether you can finish can help you find the middle ground between feeling pressure to complete all the tasks on a day's to do list come what may, and just feeling that you do what you do and you don't do what you don't do. Asking whether you can finish means you just might finish, and that can
be great to see. In the meantime, this is Laura, Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.